From Los Angeles, United States to Bremerhafen, Germany - July, 2012

I contacted several places that either advertised motorcycle shipping or that I found here on HU and got all sorts of price quotes. Many of them only shipped to the UK, but my flight was into Frankfurt and I wasn't really keen on crossing that ditch just to get my bike. Schumacher would arrange shipping to any of the major ports in Europe and quoted $450 for my '03 BMW 1150GSA. This sounded suspiciously low, so after some investigation I learned one of several lessons about arranging your own shipping as opposed to paying somebody to do it all for you: there are several players in the process - the guys where send it out, the guys with the boat, the guys at the receiving end, and the governmental bureaucrats at the receiving end. Schumacher's $450 covered the sending out and the boat, but just set you up with the guys at the receiving end whom you have to deal with directly, and the cost for that was an additional 175 Euro. All in all, still pretty cheap.

It took about an hour to drop it off in Gardena, all went smooth. BTW, I had to do this about 2 months before I wanted to pick up the bike, 1 month for on the water and one month for loading and accumulating enough vehicles to fill a container as well as the unloading.

The awesome public transportation system in Europe made very easy and cheap to get to the places I needed to go to retreive the bike: The receiving agent's office, then the customs office, and then the warehouse. Unfortunately, the new battery I had ordered before shipping the bike turned out to be the wrong size, so it went with the old one and it was DOA after sitting for two months. This must happen frequently as the guys at the warehouse had a car starter thingy to jump start it and get me on my way.

While I was required to have less than a quarter tank of gas, I was allowed to ship stuff with the bike as long as I provided them with a list of everything that was going with the bike, stuffed in the panniers and a duffel bag strapped on top. This saved me a lot of hassle lugging camping and riding gear all over the place before getting to the bike.

It takes a bit more effort on your part shipping like this but for me the cost savings were worth it, it's also a little mini adventure on it's own! Admittedly, I speak fluent German, but I don't think it would have been any problem with only English.